Economy

The Washington political class always has suffered from insularity, as their surprise at the rise of Trump shows. An early version of this blindness occurred in 1816 when members of the 14th Congress voted to more than double their pay to a princely $1,500 annually, (about $25,000 in 2016 dollars), a sum much larger than the earnings of almost every voter in the country.

Lance Roberts of Real Investment Advice blog plucked this from a recent post by Daniel Thornton, a longtime economic advisor at the St. Louis Fed, and asked the question: “Is this the scariest chart out there?” Basically, it goes all the way back to 1952 to show just how out of whack household net worth has become. As you can see, the last two times there was a big trend divergence, a bust soon followed. Thornton describes it as “monetary and fiscal policy insanity,” and predicts there’s more to come when the bubble bursts — which could be as soon as this year.

The ever increasing amount of cash also highlights how US boardrooms are reticent to invest in their businesses, choosing instead to increase dividends, in a sign of the continued anxiety that economic activity could still slow at home or in China.

A United States President has called for maximum wage before. The Institute for Policy Studies reminds us that Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted a 100 percent tax on annual incomes over $25,000 during World War II. Although Congress didn’t pass this bill, it did pass a 94 percent tax on annual incomes over $200,000—which the Institute for Policy Studies calls “a move that would help usher in the greatest years of middle-class prosperity the United States has ever known.”

“The patient is in a critical condition. The International Monetary Fund is concerned that the global economic recovery has taken too long. Kaushik Basu, chief economist of the World Bank, says the financial crisis has left a ‘festering wound’ that is ‘refusing to heal.’ Growth is too weak, resulting in the equivalent of a compromised immune system that has left the economy vulnerable to fresh diseases.

Mr. Obama insisted that the move should not be interpreted as carte blanche for weapons sales to Vietnam and that the United States would review future arms sales to “examine what’s appropriate and what’s not,” as it does with any country.

The scenario presented above uses BP’s Energy Outlook 2035, published in Feb 2016. This outlook does not extend to 2040 and maximum output is 88 Mb/d in 2035 at the end of the scenario. This scenario is still optimistic, but is more reasonable than the EIA AEO 2016. Extraction rates rise to 10.6 percent and the annual decline rate rises to 2.5 percent in 2042 and is reduced to less than 2 percent by 2053.

The offer, which values Monsanto’s outstanding shares -- without accounting for debt -- at about $53 billion, represents a 37 percent premium to the May 9 closing price. The payment would be funded with a combination of debt and equity, with about $15.5 billion coming from selling shares to existing investors. Bayer doesn’t expect to sell any assets to fund the purchase, Baumann said.

Gold & Silver

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